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Sunday, November 29, 2015

Addicted to Distraction

Credit
Yoshi Sodeoka

Addicted to Distraction

By TONY SCHWARTZNOV. 28, 2015

ONE
evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the
same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that
it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary
focus.

I
was horrified. All my life, reading books has been a deep and
consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I
regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table,
staring at me in silent rebuke.

Instead
of reading them, I was spending too many hours online, checking the
traffic numbers for my company’s website, shopping for more colorful
socks on Gilt and Rue La La, even though I had more than I needed, and
even guiltily clicking through pictures with irresistible headlines such
as “Awkward Child Stars Who Grew Up to Be Attractive.”

During
the workday, I checked my email more times than I cared to acknowledge,
and spent far too much time hungrily searching for tidbits of new
information about the presidential campaign, with the election then
still more than a year away.

“The
net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to
dividing attention,”Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows:
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”

“We willingly accept the loss
of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the
fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or
at least diverting information we receive.”

Addiction
is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so
compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life.

By that
definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the
Internet.

It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially
sanctioned addiction.

According to one recent survey,
the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email.
That doesn’t count time online spent shopping, searching or keeping up
with social media.

The
brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate
gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.

Endless
access to new information also easily overloads our working memory.

When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to
long-term memory significantly deteriorates. It’s as if our brain has
become a full cup of water and anything more poured into it starts to
spill out.

I’ve
known all of this for a long time. I started writing about it 20 years
ago. I teach it to clients every day. I just never really believed it
could become so true of me.

Denial
is any addict’s first defense. No obstacle to recovery is greater than
the infinite capacity to rationalize our compulsive behaviors. After
years of feeling I was managing myself reasonably well, I fell last
winter into an intense period of travel while also trying to manage a
growing consulting business. In early summer, it suddenly dawned on me
that I wasn’t managing myself well at all, and I didn’t feel good about
it.

Beyond
spending too much time on the Internet and a diminishing attention
span, I wasn’t eating the right foods. I drank way too much diet soda. I
was having a second cocktail at night too frequently. I was no longer
exercising every day, as I had nearly all my life.

In
response, I created an irrationally ambitious plan. For the next 30
days, I would attempt to right these behaviors, and several others, all
at once. It was a fit of grandiosity. I recommend precisely the opposite
approach every day to clients. But I rationalized that no one is more
committed to self-improvement than I am. These behaviors are all
related. I can do it.

The
problem is that we humans have a very limited reservoir of will and
discipline.

We’re far more likely to succeed by trying to change one
behavior at a time, ideally at the same time each day, so that it
becomes a habit, requiring less and less energy to sustain.

I
did have some success over those 30 days. Despite great temptation, I
stopped drinking diet soda and alcohol altogether. (Three months later
I’m still off diet soda.) I also gave up sugar and carbohydrates like
chips and pasta. I went back to exercising regularly.

I failed completely in just one behavior: cutting back my time on the Internet.

My
initial commitment was to limit my online life to checking email just
three times a day: When I woke up, at lunchtime and before I went home
at the end of the day. On the first day, I succeeded until midmorning,
and then completely broke down. I was like a sugar addict trying to
resist a cupcake while working in a bakery.

What
broke my resolve that first morning was the feeling that I absolutely
had to send someone an email about an urgent issue. If I just wrote it
and pushed “Send,” I told myself, then I wasn’t really going online.

What
I failed to take into account was that new emails would download into
my inbox while I wrote my own. None of them required an immediate reply,
and yet I found it impossible to resist peeking at the first new
message that carried an enticing subject line. And the second. And the
third.

In
a matter of moments, I was back in a self-reinforcing cycle. By the
next day, I had given up trying to cut back my digital life. I turned
instead to the simpler task of resisting diet soda, alcohol and sugar.

Even
so, I was determined to revisit my Internet challenge. Several weeks
after my 30-day experiment ended, I left town for a monthlong vacation.
Here was an opportunity to focus my limited willpower on a single goal:
liberating myself from the Internet in an attempt to regain control of
my attention.

I
had already taken the first step in my recovery: admitting my
powerlessness to disconnect. Now it was time to detox. I interpreted the
traditional second step — belief that a higher power could help restore
my sanity — in a more secular way. The higher power became my
30-year-old daughter, who disconnected my phone and laptop from both my
email and the Web. Unburdened by much technological knowledge, I had no
idea how to reconnect either one.

I
did leave myself reachable by text. In retrospect, I was holding on to a
digital life raft. Only a handful of people in my life communicate with
me by text. Because I was on vacation, they were largely members of my
family, and the texts were mostly about where to meet up at various
points during the day.

During
those first few days, I did suffer withdrawal pangs, most of all the
hunger to call up Google and search for an answer to some question that
arose. But with each passing day offline, I felt more relaxed, less
anxious, more able to focus and less hungry for the next shot of instant
but short-lived stimulation.

What happened to my brain is exactly what I
hoped would happen: It began to quiet down.

I
had brought more than a dozen books of varying difficulty and length on
my vacation. I started with short nonfiction, and then moved to longer
nonfiction as I began to feel calmer and my focus got stronger. I
eventually worked my way up to “The Emperor of All Maladies,” Siddhartha
Mukherjee’s brilliant but sometimes complex biography of cancer, which
had sat on my bookshelf for nearly five years.

AS
the weeks passed, I was able to let go ofmy need for more facts as a
source of gratification.

I
am back at work now, and of course I am back online. The Internet isn’t
going away, and it will continue to consume a lot of my attention. My
aim now is to find the best possible balance between time online and
time off.

I
do feel more in control. I’m less reactive and more intentional about
where I put my attention.

When I’m online, I try to resist surfing
myself into a stupor. As often as possible, I try to ask myself, “Is
this really what I want to be doing?” If the answer is no, the next
question is,

“What could I be doing that would feel more productive, or
satisfying, or relaxing?”

I
also make it my business now to take on more fully absorbing activities
as part of my days. Above all, I’ve kept up reading books, not just
because I love them, but also as a continuing attention-building
practice.

I’ve
retained my longtime ritual of deciding the night before on the most
important thing I can accomplish the next morning. That’s my first work
activity most days, for 60 to 90 minutes without interruption.
Afterward, I take a 10- to 15-minute break to quiet my mind and renew my
energy.

If
I have other work during the day that requires sustained focus, I go
completely offline for designated periods, repeating my morning ritual.
In the evening, when I go up to my bedroom, I nearly always leave my
digital devices downstairs.

Finally,
I feel committed now to taking at least one digital-free vacation a
year. I have the rare freedom to take several weeks off at a time, but I
have learned that even one week offline can be deeply restorative.

Occasionally,
I find myself returning to a haunting image from the last day of my
vacation. I was sitting in a restaurant with my family when a man in his
early 40s came in and sat down with his daughter, perhaps 4 or 5 years
old and adorable.

Almost
immediately, the man turned his attention to his phone. Meanwhile, his
daughter was a whirlwind of energy and restlessness, standing up on her
seat, walking around the table, waving and making faces to get her
father’s attention.

Except for brief moments, she didn’t succeed and after a while, she glumly gave up. The silence felt deafening.

..........................................

Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of The Energy Project, a consulting firm, and the author, most recently, of “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working.”

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